“How close are we to Blackout?” Yes, Will’s voice was definitely tense.
“Several days at least,” said Hartley. “Stop worrying. You’re practically here now.”
“They won’t let me go at all if you don’t pay them first,” said Will.
“Didn’t I just say to stop worrying?”
“I can recover at home! There’s nothing wrong with me!”
Hartley sighed. Will’s voice came again, plaintively: “Get me out of here, Hart.”
“I’ll call you later,” said Hartley, and he cut the link. He looked over at Barington Strife. “I want you to go to Baret Station.”
Strife looked startled, and more than startled.
Hartley said with some impatience, “Wipe that look off your face—we’ve got plenty of time till Blackout, so if you have a Panic attack, it’s your own damned neurotic fault. I want you to go and tell Sergeant Stockton that I’m working on getting him released.”
“You just told him. Sir.”
“I want you to tell him what you’ve seen me do— calling the admins here, the Station people, the hospital. Be specific.”
“Why go all the way over there? He knows what you just said!”
“But from you,” said Hartley, “he might believe it.”
“I gave it to Tal,” said Adrian simply. They were sitting together on the edge of their bed. His boots were half-off, and her hair was unbound for the night, falling past her shoulders in a straight, dark river.
“You must be joking,” said Iolanthe, who had heard enough criticisms of their demon from Fischer to doubt Adrian’s sanity. “Tal believes that self-interest and blackmail are what bring the human race together in happy fellowship.”
“And Harry believes for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows. Not a useful attitude in a security officer.”
She fell back on the bed with a thump. “I’m not sure I like Tal.”
Adrian’s lips curved. “That leaves you in solitary company, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Maybe the rest of us realize something you don’t,” she said, and as Adrian reached for the top button of her robe she said, “No, wait. It’s true, isn’t it?” She stared into his face. “You do like him.” It came out as an accusation.
“All right, I do,” said Adrian. “But more importantly in a post that involves weaponry, I can count on him.”
“He has no soul,” pointed out Iolanthe. She raised herself on one elbow.
“I can’t argue theology,” he said, reaching again for the button. “But I know that I’m the only supporter he has in i the Administration.”
“It seems,” she said, “that blackmail is what brings the human race together.”
“In happy fellowship,” agreed her husband, pressing her back down on the bed.
When he woke later, it was in darkness and to an empty bed. He rose and put on a robe and walked out to the sitting room of their suite.
Iolanthe was stretched out on the sofa, a pile of books on the floor beside her. The top one, he saw, was labeled Legends of the Three Cities: A Sociological Perspective. The one in her hands was The Politics of Empire Colonies. The reading light from the wall just above her cast a halo on her face.
She looked up. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t. I guess I just missed you.”
She sat up and swung her feet to the floor. Her white , nightgown had slipped off one shoulder, and Adrian began thinking that it was just as well they were both ! awake. She said, “Sweetheart, I have to talk to you.”
He found himself grinning. Sweetheart didn’t happen often.
“Seriously,” she said.
“All right.” He wiped the grin away, at least on the outside.
“How could you be so blind as to make Tal your security chief? Do you realize that gives him override privileges on all the City’s weapons?”
“Darling, I think I know what the position entails a little better than you d—”
“No, Adrian, listen to me! Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” she said, in an unconscious imitation of Brandon Fischer’s words earlier that day. “You’re slipping him onto the Council, where he can be a lightning rod for all the unpopular things that have to be done but you don’t want to be seen as the one doing. Everybody can resent him for bringing them up instead of you. And then, Security is the customary focus for anybody who wants to take over the Protectorship. But you think, how high can this Security Chief go? There’s a natural ceiling on the career of a demon.”
Adrian blinked. “This can hardly be such a brilliant move, if everybody sees through it.”
“Oh, it’ll work anyway. Seeing through it won’t help anybody … as you already know, my love.”
Adrian sat there for a few minutes, then said, “When you asked about the links, I thought you meant to read books of romances.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, with her first trace of uncertainty. “Have I offended? You said I could read anything in the public access paths.”
“Yes. I mean, yes I did. No, you haven’t offended. I’m just surprised. I didn’t expect my seventeen-year-old bride to give me an analysis of our latest organizational change.”
“I was eighteen six weeks ago.”
“So you were,” he recalled. “We had a party.”
She stood up. “My last headache gave me time to think,” she said. “And I went through the library catalogue again when I got up. I know why we’ve never downloaded the last edition of the Imperial Encyclopedia, Adrian. We’re still on the first edition even though in some places it’s centuries out of date. I know, it costs money, and I know, all the editions are out of date, but the fact is that the last editions were censored before they were released.”
Adrian was staring at her. “Well, well,” he said. He got up and went over to the table beside the door and turned on the reading lamp there. Then he sat down again.
Io said, ‘They’re supposed to be updated, but they’ve been cut. The last
